At a recent conference, I talked to many email marketers who were shockingly unfamiliar with email deliverability testing. I thought email deliverability testing was a given at most companies, since deliverability tools have long been widely available. Nope. Apparently, a lot of you aren't there yet.

So here's a crash course on how to do deliverability testing. It's easier than you think. 

First, let's talk about what email deliverability is. Simply put, it's the ability to get your email into the inbox, and it's not the same as the delivered metric you see in your email-marketing software.

Measuring True Email Deliverability

Your email-marketing software tracks how much email went out and how much bounced back due to issues like a bad address or a full mailbox. The percent-delivered metric – which is almost always in the 95-100 percent range – describes how many messages successfully arrived at the ISPs.

However, it tells you nothing about what the ISPs did with your email after they received it. The ISPs can choose whether to send your email to the inbox, relegate it to the bulk folder or refuse to deliver it at all, based largely on your sender reputation. (For more information, read our recent article, Four Guaranteed Ways to Trash Your Reputation.)

Your actual inbox-delivery rate is probably in the 70-90 percent range, considerably lower than what's reported by your ESP. Email delivery testing is the only way to guesstimate what's really making it to the inbox.

The old-fashioned way is to set up accounts at Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo!, AOL and various ISPs, then add these seed addresses to your mailing lists. Whenever you send a campaign out, you manually visit each account and track if your email arrived and whether it went to the inbox or the junk folder.

A less time-consuming and more comprehensive method is to use a commercial offering like Lyris HQ Deliverability Tools. Tools like this put your manual seed list on steroids, sending your message to hundreds of accounts at dozens of ISPs all over the world. They automatically calculate your inbox-delivery rate and report which ISPs may be blocking you.

Avoiding Spammy Content

The days when using the word "free" fast-tracked you to the junk folder are long gone, but that doesn't mean that the wrong kind of content can't get you blocked. Many corporations and ISPs still use content-based spam filters, in conjunction with reputation-based filters, to try to screen out the bad guys.

So it's a good idea to run your email through a content-based filter just to make sure there are no glaring red flags.

Free online tools like Lyris ContentChecker™ for Email allow you to paste in your HTML code and receive a spam score. Commercial offerings like Lyris HQ go one step further by checking your email against several widely used content filters, since each filter has its own proprietary rules and may score your email differently.

Staying Off Blacklists

Like content filters, blacklists are a secondary tool for separating spam from legitimate email. These filters look up the IP address associated with your sender domain and "from" address, as well as the IP addresses associated with any links in your email.

If your email references a blacklisted IP address – even if it's a seemingly harmless third-party link that has nothing to do with your company – your email could get blocked.

A Google search for "email blacklist" will turn up a number of free online tools that let you enter an IP address and see if it's blacklisted. The advantage of using commercial tools like Lyris HQ is that you don't have to know your IP address. These tools automatically run the IP addresses associated with your message against hundreds of blacklists.

Fine-Tuning Email Rendering

Different email clients, such as AOL, Hotmail and Outlook, display your email differently. Your email might look great in one program, but have garbled fonts or off-kilter alignment in another. And because different clients have different screen widths, preview-pane sizes and rules for disabling images, you might see a little bit of your message in one and a lot in another.

If you don't use a commercial product like Lyris HQ to see how your email marketing campaigns display in different clients and mobile environments, you should set up multiple email accounts at different providers. Send a test email to each address and manually look at your message in each client's inbox, preview pane and full window to detect and fix email-rendering problems.

It's important to optimize email rendering, because what your recipients see affects your open, click-through and spam-complaint rates. ISPs factor in these types of performance metrics when they assess your sender reputation.

The Right Tools Automate Deliverability Testing

The bottom line is that there are a number of both free and fee-based email deliverability tools. If you use a commercial tool, the deliverability testing process is painless and almost automatic. Your email-marketing software allows you to perform certain tests with relative ease and view the results.

Most ESPs partner with third-party deliverability vendors, integrating some form of testing into their email-marketing software for an extra monthly fee.

With Lyris HQ, built-in deliverability monitoring comes standard at no extra charge. You automatically perform inbox-delivery, content, blacklist and rendering checks as you test and deploy each message.

So whether you use Lyris HQ, a competitor or a free tool, use something! Getting your email into the inbox is too important to just leave it up to chance.

 
Lyris HQ Deliverability Tools check inbox-delivery rates, content-based spam filters, blacklists and email rendering to give you the best chance of arriving in the inbox.

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